The New York Times on John Bolton's years as a high school right-winger:

"He had the same attitudes and beliefs then and now," said Marty McKibbin, 77, who taught at McDonogh for 46 years but still recalls clearly his debates with John Bolton about the Vietnam War in Asian history class and at lunch. "It's kind of surprising that Yale and Yale Law School and Washington, D.C., didn't change him much."

In 1966, Mr. Bolton, who has said he privately called the liberal teacher "Mao McKibbin," wrote an editorial for the school paper titled "No Peace in Vietnam," warning against "spurious" hopes for a settlement. When he stepped down as associate editor [of the school paper] after his senior year, an unsigned notice of thanks said: "John Bolton has attacked his duties with the fervor of a political fanatic. His efficient, if sometimes controversial, management of the editorial page deserves more than conservative applause."

Ed Wroe, another McDonogh scholarship student, recalls John Bolton's fervor for the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater.

So he was like this forty years ago. Maybe that explains something that's puzzled me about Bolton's notorious 1994 assertion about the UN -- "There's no such thing as the United Nations. If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

What's puzzled me is that he said this to an audience of World Federalists. Why was he even speaking to one-worlders in 1994? Did a scheduling conflict force him to miss the meeting of the Esperanto Society?

No, seriously: Doesn't this suggest that in 1994 he was still tilting at a windmill that had lost all of its blades? Who was still a World Federalist in 1994?

But clearly that's what was bred in Bolton's bones -- anger at the one-world-government, unilateral-disarmament tendencies that Goldwaterites believed were central to mid-1960s (and 1950s) liberalism. I bet Bolton still can work up a lather just thinking about Adlai Stevenson.

In this he reminds me of George W. Bush, who, by many accounts, still hasn't gotten over an encounter he says he had at Yale with William Sloane Coffin, the school's left-leaning chaplain:

When he was at Yale, his father lost a Senate race to Ralph Yarborough. William Sloane Coffin came up to the young man shortly afterward and, as Bush remembers it, said: "I know your father. Frankly he was beaten by a better man."

(The anecdote is from Bill Minutaglio's book First Son. Coffin says Bush's recollection is faulty.)

No matter who the enemy is -- Iraq, Iran, Syria -- guys like this are really fighting some demonstrator with a peace-symbol picket sign from long, long ago.